Last week, Science Daily published an article about mood congruency in vacation advertising. Essentially it says that if you’re enjoying a relaxing evening, you’re more likely to respond favorably to an ad for a relaxing vacation than an exciting or adventurous one.

In scanning the related articles, however, I came across one that said people make purchases based on how they think it will make them feel. An example they used was a mid-winter vacation advertisement for someplace warm and sunny, saying it would be most effective to make the consumer first think about their current feelings about being in a cold, snowy climate, before having them contrast this feeling with those invoked by a tropical beach. There’s still a little bit of mood congruency at play here, but in this case it is using mood congruency to invoke negative emotions, rather than starting right with the positive emotions of a vacation.

For me personally, I think advertising is most effective when it makes me want something I don’t already have. Some of the more effective ads I’ve seen were the Aruba posters that have been on the T all year. Sure, it’s easy to make Aruba look nice in February, but they show so many different activities (surfing, golfing, relaxing) that they were appealing even in the summer, when I didn’t feel like I needed to escape the weather. So while there may be something to be said for mood congruency, I think it’s most effective to then show me what I’m missing.